As I keep shouting into the void, pathologizers love shifting discussion about material conditions into discussion about emotional states.
I’ve also talked about the misuse of “enabling” and “trauma” and “dopamine” .
And this is a pattern – people coin terms and concepts to describe material problems, and pathologization culture shifts them to be about problems in the brain or psyche of the person experiencing them. Now we’re talking about neurochemicals, frontal lobes, and self-esteem instead of talking about wages, wealth distribution, and civil rights. Now we can say that poor, oppressed, and exploited people are suffering from a neurological/emotional defect that makes them not know what’s best for themselves, so they don’t need or deserve rights or money.
Here are some terms that have been so horribly misused by mental health culture that we’ve almost entirely forgotten that they were originally materialist critiques.
- Codependency
What it originally referred to: A non-addicted person being overly “helpful” to an addicted partner or relative, often out of financial desperation. For example: Making sure your alcoholic husband gets to work in the morning (even though he’s an adult who should be responsible for himself) because if he loses his job, you’ll lose your home. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/codependency-addiction-recovery.html
What it’s been distorted into: Being “clingy,” being “too emotionally needy,” wanting things like affection and quality time from a partner. A way of pathologizing people, especially young women, for wanting things like love and commitment in a romantic relationship.- Compulsory Heterosexuality
What it originally referred to: In the 1980 in essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/493756 Adrienne Rich described compulsory heterosexuality as a set of social conditions that coerce women into heterosexual relationships and prioritize those relationships over relationships between women (both romantic and platonic). She also defines “lesbian” much more broadly than current discourse does, encompassing a wide variety of romantic and platonic relationships between women. While she does suggest that women who identify as heterosexual might be doing so out of unquestioned social norms, this is not the primary point she’s making.
What it’s been distorted into: The patronizing, biphobic idea that lesbians somehow falsely believe themselves to be attracted to men. Part of the overall “Women don’t really know what they want or what’s good for them” theme of contemporary discourse.- Emotional Labor
What it originally referred to: The implicit or explicit requirement that workers (especially women workers, especially workers in female-dominated “pink collar” jobs, especially tipped workers) perform emotional intimacy with customers, coworkers, and bosses above and beyond the actual job being done. Having to smile, be “friendly,” flirt, give the impression of genuine caring, politely accept harassment, etc.
https://weld.la.psu.edu/what-is-emotional-labor/
What it’s been distorted into: Everything under the sun. Everything from housework (which we already had a term for), to tolerating the existence of disabled people, to just caring about friends the way friends do. The original intent of the concept was “It’s unreasonable to expect your waitress to care about your problems, because she’s not really your friend,” not “It’s unreasonable to expect your actual friends to care about your problems unless you pay them, because that’s emotional labor,” and certainly not “Disabled people shouldn’t be allowed to be visibly disabled in public, because witnessing a disabled person is emotional labor.” Anything that causes a person emotional distress, even if that emotional distress is rooted in the distress-haver’s bigotry (Many nominally progressive people who would rightfully reject the bigoted logic of “Seeing gay or interracial couples upsets me, which is emotional labor, so they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public” fully accept the bigoted logic of “Seeing disabled or poor people upsets me, which is emotional labor, so they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public”).- Battered Wife Syndrome
What it originally referred to: The all-encompassing trauma and fear of escalating violence experienced by people suffering ongoing domestic abuse, sometimes resulting in the abuse victim using necessary violence in self-defense. Because domestic abuse often escalates, often to murder, this fear is entirely rational and justified. This is the reasonable, justified belief that someone who beats you, stalks you, and threatens to kill you may actually kill you.- What it’s been distorted into: Like so many of these other items, the idea that women (in this case, women who are victims of domestic violence) don’t know what’s best for themselves. I debated including this one, because “syndrome” was a wrongful framing from the beginning – a justified and rational fear of escalating violence in a situation in which escalating violence is occurring is not a “syndrome.” But the original meaning at least partially acknowledged the material conditions of escalating violence.
I’m not saying the original meanings of these terms are ones I necessarily agree with – as a cognitive liberty absolutist, I’m unsurprisingly not that enamored of either second-wave feminism or 1970s addiction discourse. And as much as I dislike what “emotional labor” has become, I accept that “Women are unfairly expected to care about other people’s feelings more than men are” is a true statement.
What I am saying is that all of these terms originally, at least partly, took material conditions into account in their usage. Subsequent usage has entirely stripped the materialist critique and fully replaced it with emotional pathologization, specifically of women. Acknowledgement that women have their choices constrained by poverty, violence, and oppression has been replaced with the idea that women don’t know what’s best for themselves and need to be coercively “helped” for their own good. Acknowledgement that working-class women experience a gender-and-class-specific form of economic exploitation has been rebranded as yet another variation of “Disabled people are burdensome for wanting to exist.”
Over and over, materialist critiques are reframed as emotional or cognitive defects of marginalized people. The next time you hear a superficially sympathetic (but actually pathologizing) argument for “Marginalized people make bad choices because…” consider stopping and asking: “Wait, who are we to assume that this person’s choices are ‘bad’? And if they are, is there something about their material conditions that constrains their options or makes the ‘bad’ choice the best available option?”
Context:
First linked post (from hyperlexichypatia):
“One thing I’ve learned to identify as a red flag of Helping Helpers who Help is vaguely conflating and equivocating between discussion of physical, material problems (like poverty, violence, infectious disease, lack of actual material resources) and intangible issues like “dignity” or “self-esteem” or “respect” or “body image” or “spiritual growth” or “education” or “mindset.”
Things this kind of equivocation is used for:
- covertly suggesting that physical, material problems are caused by some psychological or spiritual defect (e.g. “If you think positive and believe in yourself, you won’t be poor anymore!” or “If you have enough faith, God will make your cancer go away!”)
- justifying coercing people to accept “help” for their (presumed) mental/ emotional/ spiritual problems as a condition of receiving help for their physical, material problems (e.g. charities that require people to pray or accept religious practice in order to receive shelter, public assistance programs that require people to undergo nutrition counseling in order to get food aid, assistance for pregnant women that requires them to submit to lessons about “valuing themselves” enough to avoid sex).
- justifying discrimination (e.g. every argument that it’s okay to pay women or young people or disabled people less than middle-aged abled men, because young/ female/ disabled people are only working for the “sense of accomplishment” or the “experience” or “feeling independent”).
- tacitly blaming victims of injustice or abuse (e.g. “teaching” abuse victims to “value themselves” enough not to get abused anymore).
- allowing people to take credit for supporting “respect” and “dignity” while actively opposing tangible legal rights or material benefits (e.g. “Of course I believe everyone should be treated with dignity and respect, but…” that doesn’t mean they should be paid a living wage, have the right to make their own choices in life, etc.)
- making claims presuming that people’s material, physical needs and what other people believe to be their mental/ emotional/ psychiatric/ spiritual “needs” are actually one and the same (e.g. every single discussion of deinstitutionalization and homelessness ever)
Obviously, there’s a time and a place for discussing intangible issues, and there’s a time and a place for voluntary, uncoerced education, counseling, psychiatric treatment, prayer, spiritual support, emotional validation, etc. But if you’re trying to talk about violence and material discrimination and desperation and somebody else keeps trying to change the subject to counseling and self-esteem, be really suspicious.”
From the second link:
“”Long Adolescence” and Disability Liberation
Cultural discourse around infantilization of young adults, particularly when justified with spurious “brain science,” is a disability issue.
Even in disability spaces, I see the argument made that 18-25 year olds aren’t “real adults” yet, because “science proves” that “the brain doesn’t fully mature” until age 26. This concept harms not only young adults, but also disabled and neurodivergent people of all ages.
To get the basic facts out of the way: The brain does not “fully mature” at age 26, or any other age. The human brain changes continuously throughout the lifespan. There is no point at which the brain stops changing until death. There are certain brain changes that commonly occur in the mid-twenties, but declaring these changes “full maturity” is completely arbitrary.
So why has the “Brain fully matures at age 26” myth taken off, and what is the impact of it? Mostly, to justify economic and cultural norms. It just so happens that this myth of “brain maturity” happened to take off during a period of economic downturn, especially for young people newly entering the workforce. But it’s okay, mainstream media outlets tell us, that young adults are increasingly unable to afford to move out of their parents’ homes, to access healthcare independently of their parents, to get married, or to have children of their own — in fact, it’s a good thing, because young people are too neurologically immature for these things anyway.
A context in which I’ve recently had a lot of arguments on this topic is the claim that young adults are too young to consent to romantic relationships with older adults, or that such relationships are “pedophilia” or inherently unethical. This is an argument that has a lot of traction in social-justice-minded spaces, because it’s ostensibly about sexual abuse but it’s actually about infantalization, and it has deeply harmful implications that go far beyond your squick at May/December relationships.
“BUT HYPATIA, YOU HEARTLESS LIBERAL, older people who preferentially date younger people (especially older men who preferentially date younger women) often ARE fetishistic and abusive!”
Yes, they are. So are lots of people from privileged groups who preferentially date people from marginalized groups. It’s a problem that needs to be addressed, but the assumption relationships that are “mixed” along a privilege axis, or that marginalized partners cannot consent, is still far more harmful, because it has implications beyond relationships.
“BUT HYPATIA, YOU HEARTLESS LIBERAL, we’re protecting young people from abuse!”
No, you’re not. Young people often enter unwise relationships — relationships they KNOW are unwise — because it’s their only recourse for escaping the control of their parents. Normalizing the idea that young adults should still be under protection and control of parents or guardians ensures that young adults have fewer safe options for escape and autonomy. This creates a ripe opportunity for abusive, manipulative, and exploitative people to offer young people freedom from parental control. The harms done to young people by attempting to “protect” them from their own decisions are far greater than the harms young people can cause themselves by making unwise decisions.
“But people don’t magically become mature adults on their 18th birthdays! Shouldn’t there be a transitional period for young people to gradually assume more adult rights and responsibilities, with support, guidance, and scaffolding, and protection from predators who would take advantage of youthful inexperience?”
Yes, that’s exactly right! There should be a transitional period! That is, in fact, the purpose of childhood. And adolescence. The fact that an 18 year old is not significantly different in maturity from a 17 year old is not an argument for giving the 18 year old fewer rights; it’s an argument for giving the 17 year old more rights.
Adult rights and responsibilities should be gradually rolled out, over time, with support and guidance, and special protections in place due to the inherent vulnerability of youth. But the 18th birthday should be the end point of that transition, not the beginning. Because although the brain never stops maturing, rights are important, and the allotment of them should not be delayed any longer than absolutely necessary.
What does all this have to do with disability?
A lot. First of all, any time the argument is made that a group of people should be denied rights based on the structure of their brains, neurodivergent people are affected. The argument that young adults should be denied full autonomy because they’re often financially dependent on parents/family also has implications for disabled people — many disabled people will never be “financially independent,” no matter how old we are. There are more specific ties to disability, too. Part of the justification for restricting the rights of young adults is that certain psychiatric disabilities are, or are presumed to be, more prevalent in, or originally manifesting in, young adults. Forcing young adults into involuntary psychiatric treatment is justified because, after all, they’re too neurologically immature to realize that they’re neurologically defective.
Another premise in the argument that young adults aren’t fully “real adults” is that young adults are often college students, while “real adults” are out of school. This is, first of all, factually untrue — colleges are increasingly recruiting students of all ages, and students older than 26 are far from rare. When I was arguing with someone who claimed that a romantic relationship between a young adult and an older adult was wrong because the younger adult was “probably still in school,” I pointed out that most college classrooms are a melting pot of ages, and, in fact, many older/younger couples meet in the same college class! More specifically to disability issues, though, the assumption that “student = still basically a child” disproportionately harms disabled people who, for a variety of reasons, may take longer than “average” to graduate. The entire framing of higher education as a “life stage” is a centering of a class and ability experience that is far from universal.
And look, I don’t really care if you’re judgmental of May/December romances. Fine, judge them. No one is making you approve.
I care that universities consider it appropriate to notify students’ parents about health information, and that states are making it easier to involuntarily commit 18-26 year olds, and that underpaying or not paying at all younger workers is justified because “They’re not really old enough to be independent anyway,” and that people with fallopian tubes aren’t allowed to have tubal ligations until they’re 25, and that transgender people aren’t allowed to access gender-affirming surgeries because of “brain maturity,” and that disabled adults are denied civil rights because they supposedly “have the mind of a child.” And all of those rights violations are enabled by this pervasive myth that people can’t become “real adults” until they’ve financially succeeded in a bad economy, or until they’ve graduated an inaccessible higher education system, or until they reach some arbitrary level of “brain maturity” that some neurodivergent people will never reach. That’s a harmful premise, no matter how well-intentioned.”
Post on ‘Enabling’:
“Enabling people to exist
It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon, so it’s a good time to remind everyone that the concept of “enabling” is ableist, capitalist propaganda.
The “enabling” concept originated in the context of addiction — the premise being that friends and family of addicted people should not help the addicted person continue to use drugs or alcohol. Even in this original context, it’s rather heartless — addicted people can literally die from drug withdrawal; they can’t always just choose to stop taking drugs.
But it’s been taken much further in a capitalist society where being poor and being disabled are considered “bad choices.” Even the most rudimentary aid to the poor is classified as “enabling.” Privileged people are allowed to frame themselves as rationally displaying “tough love” by allowing people to starve and die in the streets.
Recently, a free public toilet for homeless people was criticized as “enabling.” Because if people with no home, no money, few possessions, and minimal access to hygiene are allowed to use the toilet, this may “enable” their “choice” to be poor. Somehow if they have no toilet, the desperation might somehow “motivate” poor people to… generate money and a home, somehow. This is the depth of the capitalist belief that making poor people suffer is good, actually, because poverty is their own fault.
This, of course, also applies to disability. Equal access “enables” disabled people to choose to be disabled. With enough barriers in place, we will become motivated to simply choose to be abled.
In particular, this capitalist-classist-ableist-neurobigoted trope applies at the intersection of psychiatrically disabled people who choose not to use medication, and also are poor, unemployed, or homeless. Material assistance is denounced as “enabling” psychiatrically disabled poor people’s “bad choice” to opt out of psychiatric medication, as it is presumed that, if they were pressured or forced to accept medication (or were desperate enough to acquiesce to it), they would become neurotypical-passing, and be hired for some well-paying job that would lift them out of poverty. Of course, this isn’t how psychiatric medication nor capitalism actually work.
All people deserve a basic standard of living. Food. Shelter. Bodily autonomy. Healthcare with consent. Bathrooms. No one “chooses” to be poor and desperate. Reject the narrative of “enabling.””
Post on Trauma:
“One of the main problems I have with Trauma Discourse (besides the problems I’ve already outlined in all these other posts really just so many) is that calling a problem “trauma” transmutes it from a problem with a specific, identifiable, external cause to an inner “mental health” problem, the new “brain disease like diabetes” model.
If you say “He’s miserable because he’s being abused,” the solution is obvious: Stop abusing him. If you say “She’s depressed because of the trauma of being abused,” you’ve shifted the problem to her reaction, and now the solution becomes that she needs therapy or treatment or intervention to learn to process or heal from or cope with being abused.
Even in medical model advocates’ own pathology paradigm of “Post-traumatic stress disorder,” the “Post-” part is essential. The concept is supposed to refer to the stress that lingers after the trauma and danger is passed, not to the stress of ongoing danger.
Trauma discourse, as applied to public policy, has unhoused people having to sleep on the street until they’ve processed the trauma of sleeping on the street enough to be “mentally healthy” enough to deserve housing, and has schools cutting school lunch programs while training teachers in “trauma-informed” practices to help students with the trauma of being hungry.”
Post on ‘Inborn/Acquired Binary’:
“Some forms of neurodivergence are genetic and present before birth. Others are acquired by physical changes that occur in the body and brain. Others are developed and learned as a result of life experiences.
Or at least, that’s how we usually think about neurodivergence – but in reality, of course, they all intersect in everyone. Everyone is a combination of our DNA, our bodies, and our lived experiences. Every experience is experienced by the brains and bodies we already have.
Popular “trauma-informed” discourse often frames experience and psychological traits like a reliable formula: This Experience plus That Experience equals This Psychological State. In my last post, I talked about the assumption that neurodivergence-causing experiences are inherently negative. But aside from the value judgment, there’s also the reality that this view of formative experiences just isn’t that simple. There are some broad correlations that people who have certain types of experiences tend… in general… to have certain kinds of responses. But it is not universal or definite. There is no way to definitively predict how someone with certain experiences will “turn out.” There is no way to look at someone’s behavior or mental state and know what kind of experience “made them that way.” Everyone’s responses to their experience is shaped by every other factor in their lives, their past experiences, their brains, their choices and values, and so much more.
A manifestation of neurodiversity hierarchy is that some forms of neurodivergence are inborn, and those should be accepted, but other forms of neurodivergence come about from life experiences, and those should be prevented. This argument is used to exclude some neurodivergent people from the neurodivergent community. Experience and biology aren’t a binary. Everyone has both. And everyone deserves acceptance.”
Post on Reframing Acquired Neurodivergence:
“Some neurodivergent traits may be present from birth, while others are acquired as a result of one’s life experiences. A common umbrella category for the experiential factors contributing to acquired neurodivergence is “trauma.”
Not all people who experience trauma are neurodivergent (and almost all, if not literally all, people have experienced or will experience some form of trauma at some point in their lives), but most forms of neurodivergence that aren’t explicitly known to be caused by genetic or biophysical or biochemical factors are commonly assumed to be caused, or exacerbated, by trauma. A common debate in discourse of mental differences is whether mental differences in general are caused by biophysical factors OR traumatic experiences, with many insisting that conceptualizing neurodivergences as caused solely by “trauma” is the more liberatory perspective (I’ve written about this in several previous posts).
A traumatic experience is one that threatens someone’s sense of safety or well-being, which can induce negative emotions like pain, fear, despair, anxiety, depression, or panic (among others). “Trauma” is an extremely broad category for a range of experiences that can affect one’s mind, but the defining element of trauma is that it is a negative experience.
There is no terminology for positive experiences that cause or intensify neurodivergent traits. The conceptual framework doesn’t exist. Think about that for a minute.
If someone’s lived experiences contributed to their neurodivergence or Madness, the entire conceptual framework for that causal relationship presupposes that the experiences can only have been negative ones.
What would it look like to acknowledge neutral or even positive experiences that contribute to neurodivergence? What would it look like to reframe the experience of acquiring neurodivergent traits as not inherently negative?”
Post on Guilt:
“I’ve been thinking a lot about guilt lately. Maybe it’s because it’s currently Lent in the Western Christian calendar, when many Christians practice self-reflection about their wrongdoings and commit to doing better. Guilt gets a bad rap, as emotions go. It’s not pleasant, but just as other negative emotions like anger, sadness, and pain have their uses, so does guilt. In particular, guilt alerts people to what they’re doing that they shouldn’t be (or what they’re not doing that they should be). It’s an indicator that something is wrong and needs to change. The problem, so often, is what people feel guilty about, and what they do about that feeling.
I’ve seen a post going around social media of an exchange between a therapist and a client. The therapist says that children are resilient, and the client replies that if that’s true, why do all adults need therapy? This leaves the therapist at a loss for words.
Obviously, this exchange rests on several assumptions– first of all, who decided that “all adults” need therapy? Yet equally obviously, the therapist has a professional interest in not disputing this premise. In fact, the therapist is in a real bind, because of the conflicting messages that mental health culture has about parental guilt. One message, directed at parents (especially mothers) is that parental guilt is unnecessary, irrational, and pointless. All parenting choices are equally valid. Children are resilient and will not be harmed by anything their parents do to them. The other message, directed at adults who feel harmed or traumatized by their childhood experiences, is that their grievances are valid, and they should not have been expected to simply resiliently endure their parents’ mistreatment of them. The inherent conflict in these messages leads to some truly contorted reasonings in mental health culture – all parents are doing the best they can and should not be judged nor feel guilty, but all children are abused and traumatized by their parents. Usually the hinge used to square this conflict is that parental-induced trauma is caused by parents’ own “trauma” or “mental illness” – all parents do their best, but they are Intrinsically Defective, so they contaminate others with their Intrinsic Mental Defect.
From a radical Mad/ neurodiversity/ cognitive liberty and youth rights perspective, the problem is not “mental illness” or trauma, but power – parents and guardians, and adults generally, have near absolute power over children. Their exercise of this power, even if well-meaning, is frequently harmful and traumatic. People who wield this near-absolute power may feel guilt over some of the choices they make, but they rarely question their own position of power.
Guilt is a natural response to holding positions of power, because we naturally have some inkling that holding power over others is in some way wrong. But without an acknowledgment or analysis of that power, and steps taken to wield power responsibly (or surrender it), guilt becomes useless.
Ask any group of people what they feel guilty about, or what their worst vices are. A surprising number will mention something to do with food. Eating ice cream isn’t a vice! The only food you should feel guilty about eating is human meat. Otherwise, you’re fine. Food is morally neutral. Why do so many people feel guilty about eating snacks, but not about participation in oppressive capitalist kyriarchy? Why do so many parents feel guilty about using one or another kind of diapers, but not for beating their children, subjecting them to behaviorism, or micromanaging their lives, which they invariably defend as good and correct parenting? Why do people feel guilty about the sugar content in the cookies they eat, but not the labor conditions in the factories that made them?
If what you feel guilty about isn’t what actually harms people – and if your guilt isn’t motivating you to take steps to change or mitigate that harm – then it’s useless, and you might as well give it up. But if you’re willing to be honest with yourself, look at how your behavior actually affects others, and change it accordingly.”
Post on the Housing Crisis:
“One of the most common criticisms of “housing first” initiatives (programs to provide housing for unhoused people unconditionally without gatekeeping) is that housing first “does not improve mental health.”
Now, let’s set aside for the moment that this criticism is irrelevant — the purpose of housing is to provide shelter, not to “improve mental health” — what definition of “mental health” could possibly make this true? As much as I try to critique and deconstruct the social construction of “mental health,” how could it possibly be true that having a safe, assured place to live would not result in greater happiness, greater inner peace, less depression, less anxiety, less negative emotions, than living on the street?
What possible definition of “mental health” would not be improved by being housed rather than unhoused?
Answering this requires unpacking the wildly different, almost completely unrelated, definitions of “mental health,” one applied to relatively privileged people, and one applied to oppressed people.
For relatively privileged people, the concept of “mental health” is centered on emotional well-being, introspection and self-awareness, and the mitigation or management of negative emotions like pain, depression, anxiety, and anger.
For oppressed people, the concept of “mental health” is centered on compliance, obedience, and productivity.
Like most privilege disparities, this isn’t binary. For most people who are privileged in some ways and marginalized in other ways, “mental health support” will include some degree of the emotional support given to privileged people, and some degree of the compliance and productivity training given to oppressed people, with the proportions varying on where exactly each person falls on various privilege axes. All children are oppressed by ageism, so all children’s “mental health” has some elements promoting compliance, obedience, and productivity. But relatively privileged children may also receive some emotional support mixed in, while children of color, children in poverty, and children with existing neurodivergence labels will receive a much higher ratio of compliance training to emotional support.
One of the clearest illustrations of this disparity is the contrast between the “self-care” recommended to privileged people, and the “meaningful days” imposed on oppressed people.
Relatively privileged people are often told, by therapists, doctors, mental health culture, and self-help books, that they are working too hard and need to rest more. They’re told that for the sake of their mental health, they need work-life balance, self-care, walks in the woods, baths with scented candles. Implicit in these recommendations is that the reason these people are working too hard is because of internal factors, like guilt or emotional drive, rather than external factors, like needing to pay the bills and not being able to afford a day off.
By contrast, unhoused people, institutionalized people, people labeled with “severe” or “serious” or “low-functioning” mental disabilities, are literally prescribed labor. Publicly funded “mental health initiatives” require the most marginalized members of society to work tedious jobs for little or no pay, under the premise that loading boxes at a warehouse will make their days “meaningful” and thus improve their “mental health.” And unlike the self-care advice given to relatively privileged people, the forced-labor-for-your-own-good approach is not optional. People are either forced into it directly by guardians or institutions, or coerced into it as a precondition to access material needs like housing and food.
The form of “mental health” applied to relatively privileged people has some genuinely useful and beneficial elements. We could all stand to introspect and examine our own feelings more, manage our negative emotions without being overwhelmed by them, have self-confidence. We all need rest and self-care.
Still, privileged mental health culture, even at its best, is deeply flawed. At best, it tends to encourage a degree of self-centeredness and condescension. It’s obsessed with classifying experiences as “trauma” or “toxic.” It’s one of the worst culprits in feeding the “long adolescence” phenomenon and generally perpetuating the idea that treating people as incompetent is doing them a kindness. Even the best therapists serving the most privileged clients have a strong tendency towards gaslighting and “correcting” people about their own feelings and desires.
But perhaps the worst consequence of privileged mental health culture is that it gives cover to the dehumanizing, abusive, compliance-oriented “mental health care” forced upon the most marginalized people. Privileged people are encouraged to universalize their experiences with sentiments like “We all deal with mental health” or assume that the mild, relatively benign “mental health care” they experienced are the norm, so what are those silly mad liberation people complaining about?
Tonight, I listened to a leader from an agency serving unhoused people talk about how “Everyone struggled with mental health during the pandemic”… and then later mention that their shelter categorically excludes people with paranoid schizophrenia diagnoses.
So perhaps “everyone struggles with mental health,” but only certain people are categorically excluded from services, from shelter, from autonomy, from basic human rights, because of how their brains happen to work.
As always, it seems like so much effort in the mad liberation/ neurodiversity/ antipsychiatry movement is spent holding the hands of relatively privileged people receiving relatively privileged “mental health care” and reassuring them that we’re not trying to take it away from them. Fine, it’s great that you like your antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication and your nice therapist who listens to you and your support group. Great. Go live your best life. But that has nothing to do with our fight against forced drugging, forced labor, forced institutionalization, forced poverty. It’s not even close to the same “mental health.””
Post on Trauma and Equality:
“Trauma and Equality
“Anything can be traumatic, so you can’t judge what’s traumatic to someone else” and “It’s wrong to say that someone’s trauma is ‘not so bad’ compared to someone else’s” are well-meaning concepts that, increasingly, I’m seeing used in harmful ways that, intentionally or not, have the effect of amplifying the emphasis on milder traumas of more privileged people, and minimizing emphasis on objectively more severe traumas of more marginalized people.
We’re not supposed to say that some traumatic experiences are not that bad, but the reality is that some traumatic experiences are actually, objectively not as bad as others. In fact, sometimes, when a negative experience is perceived as “traumatic” by a privileged person, the problem is not that the experience was actually traumatic; the problem is that the privileged person felt an undeserved sense of entitlement to never have their privilege challenged or be expected to respect the rights of others. “All traumas are equally valid” is becoming the “All lives matter” of psychiatrically disabled people.
I’ve repeatedly had exchanges like this with people who identify as members of supporters of the mad/ neurodiversity/ psych disabled communities —
“Abusive behavior is caused by trauma.”
“But here is an example of person with a privileged life, loving family, supportive friends, everything he could ever want, who is nevertheless abusive.”
“You can’t know what’s traumatic to someone else. Maybe his mother didn’t breastfeed him. That could be traumatic.”
“Okay, but there are people who experienced much worse forms of trauma, who are not abusive.”
“You can’t say that someone’s trauma is not so bad compared to someone else’s! All trauma matters!”
This is also perfectly compatible with the mainstream, common assumptions of mainstream American society. It’s consistent with the way most mainstream writers frame racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry as the product of “disaffected” or “disenfranchised” working-class people, ignoring their popularity with successful, powerful people. It’s consistent with how all discussions of mass violence are derailed by discussions of “bullying” and “social isolation” (even when there’s no evidence the perpetrators were bullied or isolated by anything other than their own choices). Or how “gay panic” and “trans panic” are considered valid defenses to murder, because a straight person’s fear is more important than a queer person’s life.
Ideas that were intended to validate traumatized people are being distorted into ways to prop up shoddy, bigoted theories (like “all [thing I don’t like] is caused by trauma”) and shield oppressive people from criticism. No. Not all traumatic experiences are equally severe. Not all traumatic experiences are equally RELEVANT. And if you experience “having to recognize that other people have rights, too” or “being treated as equal, rather than superior” as “traumatic,” the problem is you.”
Post on Therapy:
“Obligatory Disclaimer: Therapy is helpful to many people. If therapy is helpful to you, great! No one is saying otherwise.
Having said that.
Please stop saying that abuse survivors and traumatized people “need” therapy in order to avoid abusing others.
Please stop saying that if a traumatized person is respectful towards others, it must be proof that they’ve been through therapy.
The assumption underlying these ideas is that the default, natural response to traumatic experiences is inherently to become abusive to others, and that it’s only through active counter-programming that this can be averted. This is, first of all, false. There are plenty of non-abusive abuse and trauma survivors who, by choice or by circumstance, have never been through therapy. There are plenty of abusive people who have been through therapy. There are plenty of abusive people who have never been abused or traumatized in any way. Being traumatized isn’t like being bitten by a werewolf; it doesn’t doom you to become a predator yourself.
Aside from that, therapy aimed at preventing a traumatized person from becoming abusive is bad therapy. The goal should be to help the traumatized person improve their emotional well-being, not to defang them and render them safe for society. Traumatized people are already safe for society. It’s society that is unsafe for them.
If you are seeking therapy to help you cope with a traumatic experience, and your therapist is operating from the assumption that their services are necessary to keep you from becoming abusive, please, please, find a new therapist. There are plenty of kind, helpful therapists out there who won’t see your natural human responses to traumatic experiences as rendering you abusive or dangerous. You deserve better.”
Post on ‘Four Models’:
“Four Models
A rough overview and gross oversimplification of four paradigms of mental difference, written as a handy summary since I get asked about it a lot.
One is the strict behavioral/moral model paradigm. This view completely disregards brains and mental inner states in general, and is focused solely on socially normative behavior. In this view, every individual has a moral obligation to obey authority and to adhere to normative social standards of behavior — in a family, in mainstream, top-down schools, and in a workplace as a successful seller of labor. Being constitutionally ill-suited for these structures is no excuse not to conform to them. People should be punished for failing to obey authority or conform to normative social standards, regardless of their brains or mental states.
The second is the mainstream medical model. This is the view that most influences public policy decisions in the U.S. In this view, there is such a thing as a normal, healthy type of brain. People with this type of brain are able to conform to social norms and authorities with minimal difficulty. There is some disagreement about what exactly a “healthy” brain is, but essentially, it is a brain possessing of qualities that proponents of this paradigm consider desirable — so as is generally understood, a “healthy” brain is one conforming to American upper-middle-class, politically centrist attitudes, behaviors, ways of communicating, and ways of learning. According to this paradigm, deviations from this healthy, normal way of being are caused by physical illnesses or chemical imbalances in the structure of the brain. The solution is either medication to “correct” the “chemical imbalance,” or behavioral therapy to train the brain to operate in more normative ways, or a combination of the two. Using these methods to achieve as close as possible to a normative brain is considered the morally correct and socially responsible course of action. And because this paradigm conceptualizes some brains as objectively defective, some people with such brains are unable to make reasoned, logical, correct decisions about their own brains, and should therefore be legally coerced into treatment against their will. This practice is considered both humane (because it is correcting an objective defect, the subject cannot possibly be unhappy with the result — or rather, any unhappiness with the result can be attributed to the uncorrected defect, and is evidence that further coercive correction is needed) and necessary for public safety, since this paradigm also often equates violence and abuse with brain defects.
A third paradigm is the recovery model. This is similar to the mainstream medical model in its conception of what constitutes a normal, healthy mind, but differs from the mainstream medical model in that the recovery view adamantly rejects the premise that mental differences are caused by structural or chemical differences of the brain. Instead, this paradigm holds that deviations from the “normal, healthy mind” are caused by traumatic experiences, and that the solution is some form of trauma-informed therapy. Once the traumatic experiences are therapeutically processed and healed, the mentally deviant individual will “recover” to what this model posits is the default state of a normal, healthy mind. Like the behavioral/moral model and the mainstream medical model, the recovery model holds that a mentally deviant individual has a social responsibility to correct their deviance. But while proponents of the behavioral/moral model tend to emphasize obedience and conformity as virtues in their own right, and proponents of the mainstream medical model tend to emphasize the premise that mental deviants are incompetent to make their own decisions, proponents of recovery tend to emphasize “healthy relationships.” The obligation to seek treatment is justified from the premise that exposure to people’s mental differences (or, in the framework of this paradigm, “symptoms of unresolved trauma”) cause emotional burdens to those around them, and that excising these mental traits is necessary to have “healthy,” non-burdensome relationships.
Finally, there is the neurodiversity model, which is why this page exists. Under this paradigm, there is no such thing as a “healthy” or “normal” mind, and no such thing as an “ill” or “disordered” mind. There are just… minds. That differ from one another. That have different strengths and weaknesses, but that are not inherently better or worse than any other. If a person is ill-suited to a school, or a workplace, or a social institution, the solution is to change the social institution to be more welcoming and accommodating to all ways of being. Furthermore, since all minds are equally valid, all minds are equally competent to make decisions about their own host bodies. No one is better equipped to make a decision about an individual’s body’s or mind’s best interests than that individual themself — therefore, practices like forced drugging, involuntary hospitalization, and other forms of overriding individuals’ bodily autonomy for their alleged “own good” are inherently unjustifiable.. In this view, neurodivergent people are not burdens; rather, the expectations of neuro-normative society are the burdens on neurodivergent people. It’s important to note that this paradigm does not preclude the voluntary use of brain-altering medication or therapies. Rather, it reconceptualizes them as tools an individual may find useful for enhancing their quality of life, not as “treatments” for any kind of illness or disorder. It’s also important to note that, under this paradigm, brains and emotional states are distinct from planned, chosen beliefs and behaviors (whether those beliefs and behaviors are good, bad, or neutral). No one’s brain “causes” them to be a murderer or an abuser or a Nazi (or a kind and honorable person).
Because the neurodiversity model is the least popular and least well known of these, people who encounter it for the first time often mistake it for an offshoot of one of the other three. There are points of overlap — like proponents of the behavioral/moral model, we acknowledge that humans have the capacity to make moral choices, and that no one’s brain “causes” them to be a murderer or a Nazi. Like proponents of the mainstream medical model, we accept that physical, structural brain differences exist, corresponding with different ways of thinking, feeling, and learning, and that people cannot change their brain structure by force of will alone. Like proponents of the recovery model, we believe that forced drugging is abhorrent, and that material and social conditions are a much bigger factor in people’s happiness or unhappiness than brain chemistry. But despite these superficial overlaps, the neurodiversity paradigm is fundamentally distinct from, and incompatible with, these other three. The neurodiversity paradigm is fundamentally radical, in the literal sense of “from the root.” We challenge the root premise that mental difference needs to be changed or fixed, and switch the focus to providing tools that individuals can choose to use to connect their brains to their goals.”